Blogger.com

I’ve run across this ctrl-z bug a few times in the Blogger interface and it’s about to drive me nuts. The first time I noticed it I was working on an article that I had published previously, an article that still had some cludgy wording in it I wanted fixed, and I wanted to add a bit of HTML zing! to the post. I had it open in the blogger edit interface, the same old Blogger interface that has been the Blogger interface since the beginning of the world wide web if not the beginning of time as we know it. A white and grey interface with orange buttons? The one that has a toggle in the upper left corner that says “Compose” on one button and “HTML” on the other? Two different shades of grey? You know the one I’m talking about. I had messed up some code I had entered under the “HTML” setting, and after checking the results in “Compose” I hit ctrl-z to undo the change, and the entire post I was editing simply disappeared!

Luckily I could just back out and start over re-editing. It was a pain but at least I could access the original post. This error has happened a few times since then. Every time it has happened, I have had a version of the post that I could go back to, luckily. A frustrating but recoverable error. Until this time.

Today I was working in a test post that I keep hanging around to save snippets of code in, handily named test post. I had just done some tweaking on some code in the HTML interface. I didn’t like the way it looked in the Compose interface, and I stupidly did the same thing again. I can clearly remember thinking “where was that error?” right before discovering the error again. However, this time I had no version to go back to because test post had never been published for more than a few minutes, and since it was currently a draft post the blogger interface helpfully over-wrote my test post, with all those years of HTML coding snippets saved just for this reason, so that I wouldn’t lose them, and it over-wrote that long, ugly mess with a fresh, new, blank post it had created when I hit ctrl-z.

Funny? It did once. Does again

If I had been thinking at the time I might have stopped everything and gone looking. I mean, I know there is an excellent article (from 2009) on recovering deleted posts over on The Original Blogger Tips and Tricks. I first ran across his five points for recovering deleted blog posts last year when the mobile Blogger app helpfully overwrote a published post I just happened to have created in the mobile interface before completing it later on the desktop. When I reopened the mobile version to do what I saw as some quick editing, it opened the stored version of the earlier post, and then wrote that clearly unfinished, earlier work over the published, significantly longer, one. Suggestion four from his list look for a cached version worked like a charm on that occasion, and I was able to just pretend the entire screaming-rage-fit had never happened.

It has views to prove it.

Suggestion number three, go back to a previous version in the same window might have been helpful had I not rage-quit the window in frustration just moments before going to the blogger forums to complain about the fact that ctrl-z still deletes everything on screen in the edit interface and being helpfully reminded of the Tips and Tricks post by the first thread that mentioned ctrl-z.

This is an old, old interface error. I know it’s an old and common complaint, because there is a near-endless string of threads on the blogger forum that documents just how old and frustrating this error is. Just enter ctrl-z into the forum search window, and look at all the people who have the same problem, with no good resolution to be offered to them other than to be lectured to about backing up your data.

Yes, we understand. We are all but children in the eyes of the internet gods who never commit an error. We are so sorry to have to point this out but sometimes shit just happens. Sometimes you do something that you know is wrong at exactly the instant you do it, but you somehow still do it anyway. We children would really like known bugs to be fixed when they are brought to the attention of the for-profit programmers who work in the giant corporations that can’t help but run our flawed, childlike world. If you aren’t going to fix your errors, why the hell should the rest of us be any different? Why the hell are we relying on you when we could write code at least as well as you do, and do it in our own time? How many years does it take to fix an obvious flaw like ctrl-z blanks the edit window? I’m certain I could duplicate blogger’s interface in less than a decade, and I really don’t have to since I could install WordPress on my own website and learn about all the bugs that are in that interface, just for a nice change of pace.

At least if I’m paying WordPress I’m no longer the product being sold, but the customer being served. Food for thought.